Software development thoughts and ideas

Wallproductions on Rails

Wallproductions is a portal like site that will contain many applications. Currently it contains a couple of applications Gas Tracker and Budget Tracker. Both of these projects are live and are in production use. Over the years it’s gone through a couple of transformations. When it was first created it was a side project. It was something to work on during the weekends to see what was possible outside of what I was doing at work. The reason why the project started was due to a lack of existing applications that did what I wanted. So I set out to create my own.

When it was originally written it was done using PHP. It started out without an off the shel framework. This was a pretty good solution for a while until the project started to get larger. The larger it got the more I thought about it. I was thinking that a framework would be needed. Unless I wanted to spend all my weekends doing tedious things that were already done in the various frameworks. As the only developer working on the project it was important to be able to complete tasks with speed. So instead of creating everything myself I could use some shared code from the framework to handle all of the standard things. Things like ActiveRecord and Routing. So I looked around and I found a couple of frameworks. At the time the Yii framework seemed the most appropriate for my situation. The reason why I choose Yii instead of the other frameworks was simply because I was more familiar with how their ActiveRecord implementation worked. Also it had a pretty good extensions library so I could reuse code shared by others in the community. So I went with that and build the second version of Wallproductions off of it. This worked well and it stayed in the Yii framework for about two years.

During this period of time I change directions in my career and instead of doing PHP development I started doing Ruby development. Specifically working with Ruby on Rails. I did not know much about Ruby or Rails when I started. But after working with it for a short amount of time I was able to be more productive than ever before. Over the course of the next year Wallproductions stayed in the Yii framework. Making additional features and fixing existing bugs. Then the Yii framework introduced their new framework Yii 2. This was a complete rewrite of the framework. So I had a decision to make. Do I want to stay on the first version of Yii for a long time, do I want to rewrite the majority of my PHP code or just move to Ruby on Rails. Seeing that I work on Ruby on Rails on a daily basis it was an option. After carefully considering it I decided that I wanted to go with Ruby on Rails. So I set off on the path of rewriting my entire site using Ruby on Rails.

The first step was to gather all of the old requirements for the system. Then I needed to make sure that I met them. This was not very hard as I was the only developer on this project. Also since I wrote the entire application myself I didn’t need much documentation to understand it. Also I needed to set milestones for myself so I knew I was progressing. I didn’t want to get stuck and then have to go back. But I also didn’t want to keep spinning my wheels if it wasn’t going to work out. As I am sure you realize we all have had side projects that we start and then never finished. I decided early on that if I was going to put a ton of effort into converting Wallproductions I would finish.

The conversion itself actually went faster than I expected. I knew Ruby was very powerful and Rails added even more power to it. What I did not realize is how much power it added. I was able to convert something that I worked up for over three years in under three months. This was not your typical conversion either since it was going cross languages. Also I was not working on this conversion process full time. I was doing so like always on the weekends or nights after regular working hours. Now that I am on Ruby on Rails I am able to complete new tasks at greater speeds. At the end of the day I am glad that it’s on Ruby on Rails. I am a huge fan of the framework and the language. Also the community around it is really good.